Related papers: Structural transitions in sheared electrically sta…
In this article, we demonstrate a method for inducing reversible crystal-to-crystal transitions in binary mixtures of soft colloidal particles. Through a controlled decrease of salinity and increasingly dominating electrostatic…
The choice that a solid system "makes" when adopting a crystal structure (stable or metastable) is ultimately governed by the interactions between electrons forming chemical bonds. By analyzing 6 prototypical binary transition-metal…
A wide range of disordered materials, from biological to geological assemblies, feature discrete elements undergoing large shape changes. How significant geometrical variations at the microscopic scale affect the response of the assembly,…
The influence of a stationary shear flow on the crystallization in a glassy system is studied by means of molecular dynamics simulations and subsequent cluster analysis. The results reveal two opposite effects of the shear flow on the…
The process of structural relaxation in disordered solids subjected to repeated tension-compression loading is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. The binary glass is prepared by rapid cooling well below the glass transition…
Employing a recently developed dynamical density functional theory we study the response of a colloidal sediment above a wall to shear, demonstrating the time dependent changes of the density distribution and its center-of-mass after…
Crystals with low latent heat are predicted to melt from an entropically stabilized body-centered cubic symmetry. At this weakly first-order transition, strongly correlated fluctuations are expected to emerge, which could change the nature…
Experiments on spherical particles in a 3D Couette cell vibrated from below and sheared from above show a hysteretic freezing/melting transition. Under sufficient vibration a crystallized state is observed, which can be melted by sufficient…
The transient behaviour of highly concentrated colloidal liquids and dynamically arrested states (glasses) under time-dependent shear is reviewed. This includes both theoretical and experimental studies and comprises the macroscopic…
We develop a Landau theory for bend flexoelectricity in liquid crystals of bent-core molecules. In the nematic phase of the model, the bend flexoelectric coefficient increases as we reduce the temperature toward the nematic to polar phase…
Glasses have liquid-like structure, but exhibit solid-like properties. A central question concerns the relation between the structure and mechanical properties of glasses, but structural changes remain difficult to resolve. We use a novel…
We study the mechanical response of a dislocation-free 2D crystal under homogenous shear using a new mesoscopic approach to crystal plasticity, a Landau-type theory, accounting for the global invariance of the energy in the space of strain…
Using a phase field crystal model we study the structure and dynamics of a drop of colloidal suspension during evaporation of the solvent. We model an experimental system where contact line pinning of the drop on the substrate is…
Understanding the structural origins of glass formation and mechanical response remains a central challenge in condensed matter physics. Recent studies have identified the local caging potential experienced by a particle due to its nearest…
Crystalline bilayers of charged colloidal suspensions which are confined between two parallel plates and sheared via a relative motion of the two plates are studied by extensive Brownian dynamics computer simulations. The charge-stabilized…
On microscopic scales, the crystallinity of flexible tethered or cross linked membranes determines their mechanical response. We show that by controlling the type, number and distribution of defects on a spherical elastic shell, it is…
We examine microstructural and mechanical changes which occur during oscillatory shear flow and reformation after flow cessation of an intermediate volume fraction colloidal gel using rheometry and Brownian Dynamics (BD) simulations. A…
Structural phase transitions often couple to magnetic and electronic degrees of freedom, enabling emergent phenomena in solids. In high-entropy oxides (HEOs), which typically stabilize in highly symmetric cubic phases, such transitions are…
Chiral nematic liquid crystals exhibit both a helical planar ground state with uniform twist and a metastable defect-rich focal conic texture, and can be switched between the two microstructures via application of transient voltage pulses.…
We investigate the statistical mechanics of chirality and biaxiality in liquid crystals through a variety of theoretical approaches, including Monte Carlo simulations, lattice mean-field theory, and Landau theory. All of these calculations…